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Vamp bitch stood before her captive with hands resting on leather wrapped hips. Blood oozed from a gash across her forehead, stark red against the porcelain skin.

“Foolish, foolish boy,” she cooed in a voice that was both terrifying and seductive.

Nick strained against the chains, grimacing and snarling. Only his legs had any wiggle room, and he slammed his heels into the pillar at his back. Above him, the Greek goddess wobbled. Stone gaze never wavering, graceful arms never flailing, Aphrodite dove to the floor. Her head cratered into the glass tile and snapped off, exploding away like a bowling ball flying for a strike.

“Vous êtes des imbéciles!” vamp bitch shrieked. “Is nothing sacred to you?”

Nick spat a gob of blood in her direction. She sidestepped it in a blur and just as quickly backhanded him across the face so hard Jackson heard bones crunch. More blood gushed from Nick’s nose and filled the air with the cold metal smell of youngling blood. He was no match for these primeval forces. Yet, he railed against them, seeming to wing it more often than not, and somehow he got further than all of Jackson’s careful plotting ever did.

Jackson moved before he could think about that one too long.

Garrett grabbed his arm. “What are you doing?”

“Winging it. It’s all we’ve got left.”

For once, his uncle had no argument. The only thing that stood between them and certain death was one outmatched youngling vampire.

The Foundation’s field operations standards continued to plummet.

“God in heaven,” Garrett muttered, but fell in behind Jackson, dagger at the ready. As they hustled forward, Jackson remembered the small flashlight no one had considered important enough to remove from his pocket. Retrieving it, he thumbed it on and held it clutched in two hands together with the gun.

Nick saw them coming and redoubled his efforts to get free of the chain, which, thanks to gravity, was already unraveling. He also began hurling what must have been choice French obscenities, capturing the vamp bitch’s full attention and giving them the slimmest of advantages.

Vamp bitch, according to Foundation records, had last seen sunlight in the fourteenth century. She was a super predator to be tracked, trapped, and dispatched during the light of day only. Yet, here they were, charging her wide-awake and infuriated self with nothing but a gun and a pocket light—and their veins full of serum. His steps almost faltered as he recalled that last bit. All the anger in the world wouldn’t cloak their intentions in a direct psychic link.

And it didn’t.

Bijou’s platinum-blonde head snapped around, her face the horrific blank of an aroused vampire.

Jackson pulled the trigger, the shot like an explosion in the confined space.

A plume of red exploded on her bare shoulder—as opposed to the head he had targeted. The next instant, she came at him, black-eyed and bare-fanged—straight into the full-spectrum beam of his flashlight. Her obsidian eyes shut, and she screeched with hellish fury, but she did not retreat.

Jackson pumped the trigger again, this time at close range. Not that it made any difference. Between the adrenaline, his crippled hand, and pointing the light, he had no aim to speak of. Also, his target was gone.

More gunfire erupted from two different directions, turning the elliptical foyer into the inside of a giant gong, vibrating with the blows of sledgehammers. Shards of glass blasted up from the floor at his feet, and heat seared his right shoulder. Fuck, how could he forget about the armed guards? Winging it was going to get them killed long before the vampires could catch them.

Jackson dropped and separated his hands, keeping the light trained on Bijou, and pivoting the gun up at the security detail on the second floor landing. He squeezed off several rounds, sending them diving for cover, before swinging toward a doorway where two more guards held position. One of them was the female guard Nick had stuffed in the closet. So much for the youngling’s success rate at winging it then. Fuck!

From the corner of his eye, he saw Garrett lunge toward Bijou with the antique dagger. At the same time, the flashlight and pistol tore out of Jackson’s hands.

Garrett stopped in his tracks, eyes going wide.

All the guns fell silent, leaving only the gong to vibrate inside Jackson’s head.

Bijou stood close enough to touch, her skin glowing bright red across her blood-smeared face and shoulders. A swarm of blisters on her forehead melted away, along with the gash Nick’s blade had left there. With a dark growl, she raised Jackson’s gun and leveled it at his left eye.

Jackson lifted his hands in surrender, as though carrying a fifty-pound weight in each. The anger he depended on to carry him through trembled. The terror was far too close to the surface, his options by far too non-existent.

She watched his face, took his scent. Her hyper-dilated eyes reverted to their jewel green color and narrowed. “Oh, but you are a brave fool, are you not?” Her small mouth puckered. “And such a fine male specimen. I believe I have a use for you, after all.”

Jackson wanted to hurl at the implication. Garrett coughed beside him, then wheezed, but Jackson refused to look away from the vampire with the gun until Garrett sagged to his knees.

“Not so much use for that one,” Bijou mused.

“Garrett?”

His uncle looked up, bug-eyed and slack-jawed with wonder or shock, or both. Blood edged his pale lips, and his hands…his hands clutched at the ornate hilt of the dagger protruding from his ribcage.